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Welcome to Randle Publishing
Welcome to RandlePublishing.com! Our blog is brand new and we look forward to filling it up with the latest book news from Ian Randle Publishers, news about the world of book...
VACANCY
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IAN RANDLE PUBLISHERS Invites applications from suitably qualified persons to fill the position of
PRODUCTION CONTROLLER
Working in book production is a career for people who are highly organised, able to negotiate, diplomatic and willing to accept responsibility for the quality of the final product. The Production Controller has overall responsibility for the physical process of transforming the manuscript and artwork into the finished book. CORE FUNCTIONS o Typesetting/page layouts of books o Designing covers o Estimating, Costing and Scheduling o Print Buying o Commissioning and Supervising Freelance Designers and Typesetters; and QUALIFICATIONS o An Undergraduate degree together with a least 2 years’ experience in graphic design and/or printing. o Proficiency in industry-standard software applications particularly the Adobe Creative Suite, Corel Draw, QuarkXPress and InDesign. o Skills in Windows-based programmes are essential. o An understanding of printing techniques
In addition, Applicants should possess excellent interpersonal, written and time management skills.
Interested persons should submit letters of application along with detailed Resumes to The Managing Director Ian Randle Publishers by e-mail at clp@ianrandlepublishers.com
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New in 2011
Our first book for 2011 is off press and available: Christine Chivallon’s The Black Diaspora of the Americas: Experiences and Theories out of the Caribbean. Originally published in French, this welcomed addition to cultural studies and diaspora studies is timely in its appearance in English in this UN International Year for the People of African Descent.
The forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade created primary centres of settlement in the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States – the cornerstones of the New World and the black Americas. However, unlike Brazil and the US, the Caribbean did not (and still does not) have the uniformity of a national framework. Instead, the region presents differing situations and social experiences born of the varying colonial systems from which they were developed. Using the Caribbean experience as the focus, Christine Chivallon examins the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as founding events in the identification of a black diaspora experience. The exploration is extended to include the United States to exemplify contrasting situations in slavery-based systems and identifies the links between the expressions of culture emanting from the black populations of the New World and the diversity of interpretations of the cultural identities of the black Americas.
Divided into three main parts, The Black Diaspora of the Americas firstly examins the foundation of the black experiences of the New World by considering the slave trade. The second part takes a more theoretical examination of ‘black diaspora’ using Rastafarianism, Garveyism and PanAfricanism while referencing the work of a range of thinkers including Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Richard Price, Édouard Glissant, Melville Herskovits and Sidney Mintz. The work is concluded in the third part with the proposition of an a-centred community of persons of African descent – a culture devoid of centrality.
The Black Diaspora of the Americas brings together the key arguments about creolisation and the concept of a black diaspora and presents an outstanding contribution to understanding the dynamics of diaspora.
Tastes Like Home
This feature appeared in the Sunday 30 January 2011 edition of the Nation Newspaper in Barbados
By Sherie Holder-Olutayo | Sun, January 30, 2011 – 12:02 AM
Some of the best things in life are born out of the memories that we hold dear. Cynthia Nelson can attest to that. As a Guyanese woman living in Barbados trying to recapture her homeland’s culinary flair, something she couldn’t always replicate, Cynthia was inspired to start a blog and write a column called Tastes Of Home, which ultimately turned into a book. Just like that an idea bore fruit. “When I started with the column called Tastes Of Home and that was basically to chronicle the food I was eating now living in Barbados,” Cynthia said. “You miss the food from home. Midway through the year I was inundated with all the emails from people telling me that they missed the same kinds of food. A lot of them were like second-generation Guyanese living in the disapsora and they said to me, ‘Do you have this all in one place so that I can get it like a book?’ So the idea was born out of that.” Though not initially thinking of writing a book, that spark became Cynthia’s “aha moment.” “I spent about six months putting together the book. I had to recook all the recipes, do all the photography myself and rewrite the recipes,” she said. Looking at the size of the book Tastes Of Home, it seems like it was a daunting task, but for Cynthia it was a labour of love. The power of the Internet and its wide range helped Cynthia reached audiences from as far away as South Africa. “Many ways I thought I was writing for the people at home, but I was amazed at the scores of Caribbean people from around the world living as far away as Indonesia and Malawi. I know that Caribbean people live around the world, but I was blown away. “There is also a big community of people out there whose spouses are of Caribbean descent and have heard them talking about the dishes and the food they make and the spouses will write and ask for this recipe.” Celebrating home and cultural identity became a big part of Cynthia’s overall vision. After all, food has become such an integral part of Caribbean life. “When you live abroad, as much as you feel a part of that society that you’re now in, there’s always something missing, particularly at those key moments like holidays and festivals when they’re not celebrated in the country that you’re in,” Cynthia reflects. “You begin to ask yourself ‘Where am I?’ ‘Am I fitting into all of this?’ “This was just like a pet project really,” she said. “It did overwhelm from the standpoint that I was doing so many things at once. I still continue to teach, write my weekly column along with writing for different magazines, but it gets a little hard. From a little girl I’ve always been able to organize myself.” “Sometimes I have to cook the dish and go through the process to write about certain nuances,” she said. “Learning how to write recipes became a new thing, because most West Indians don’t follow recipes . . . . We put in a little bit of this or that.” Creating the dishes, while fun, also allowed Cynthia to add new twists to recipes. “I discovered a way to make cou cou in the microwave that only tastes 10 minutes,” she said. “I went to this dinner and this woman who is a phenomenal cook was touting the virtues of 10-minute cou cou. So I have two friends who are retired nurses and the Bajan recipes I always test on them. I did the 10-minute cou cou and I set it to them and I didn’t tell them. When they called they said, ‘This cou cou tastes really nice; how long you been cooking it?’ So when I told them it took them 10 minutes in the microwave, she was, like, ‘Send me the recipe’. “When I wrote about it my column, Bajans from England and the US were writing to say thanks, that they always wanted to make cou cou but it took so long, but this they can do. Cynthia admits that she felt heartened about how many Barbadians outside of Barbados would write to her. She is ecstatic at the thought of seeing her hard work come to fruition in the finished product of the book. “The first part of the book is a memoir section and the second part is the recipe section,” she said. “A lot of the foods that we have in the Caribbean now are far removed from what they originally were,” Cynthia said. Now with Tastes Of Home out, Cynthia is set to do a regional tour to help launch the book throughout the islands. Naturally her first stop is Guyana, her home and the inspiration behind the project.
Daddy Sharpe
The following article by Daive Dunkley, UWI, Mona, appears in the March-June 2010 edition of Caribbean Quarterly
Daddy Sharpe, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Samuel Sharpe, A West Indian Slave , Written by Himself, 1832 by Fred W. Kennedy, Kingston and Miami, Ian Randle Publishers, 2008, xii, 41 1 pp., US$24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-976-637-343-6
The use of history in fiction is quite common for the Caribbean. The combination can be found in the novels of a host of fiction writers including Jamaica Kincaid and Marlon James. Academics who have tried their hand at fiction have also made use of the rich historical data that exists on the Caribbean and most notable are the novels of Orlando Patterson, An Absence of Ruins and Die the 
Long Day. Fred Kennedy makes use of the same formula in Daddy Sharpe, a novel/narrative which joins the world of the Slave narrative with the world of fiction writing. But Kennedy in this work offers something that is quite original by taking advantage of the fact that there is not a great amount of information on the personal life of his protagonist and National Hero of Jamaica, Samuel Sharpe. Furthermore, the information that does exist on Sharpe contains many contradictory accounts, but which Kennedy confidently embraces and incorporates into his book. He states that, “I have exploited these and other examples of incongruities to help weave the narrative of Sam Sharpe’s life” (p. viii).
Kennedy has no doubt accomplished something special in this autobiographical narrative in which he has undertaken the task of writing as Sam Sharpe. Sharpe as many already know was the leader of the last Slave rebellion in the Anglo-Caribbean in 1831-32 and was executed for his role in that uprising. Today, Sharpe is a National Hero of Jamaica, where he fought the British colonial regime in the early part of the nineteenth century in a bid to end the exploitation of enslaved blacks in that country and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Kennedy makes a bold leap of faith when he assumes the role of Sharpe, placing himself in a sort of existential position as he tries relentlessly to recount the events in the life of this enslaved rebel and champion of black self-determination and liberty. But the mere fact that the book is purported to be a Slave narrative links it to a body of literature that is already large and is still growing as new works come to light. This is the category known simply as the ’slave narrative’ as well, and in which can be found popular and now classical works like The History of Mary Prince, The Narrative of Archibald Monteith and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.
Each of these slaves challenged the institution of slavery in their own way and wrote about their ordeals and has now won the attention of scholars the world over. So Kennedy is quite justified in his attempt to write a narrative of Sharpe which puts the rebel Slave in the same pantheon as other enslaved people who tried to change their own situation and that of their fellow slaves. Why Sharpe’s story is so interesting too is the fact that he led an open and bloody rebellion and one that still pulls the attention of scholars to which an upcoming work by Devon Dick can testify, The Cross and Machete. Many of the graphic and upsetting scenes from slavery appear throughout the work in which Kennedy recreates the life of Sharpe, ending with the violence that started shortly after the strike by the slaves on 27 December 1831 (p. 292). Enslaved women are raped and otherwise molested and male slaves are punished using a range of severe tactics. Even Sharpe’s mother, Mimba (or Mama) is depicted as a rape victim who then takes revenge on her assailant, an overseer named Mr. Crawford, when she gets a chance to do so several years later (pp. 10, 362). Before that, Crawford was punished by his removal from the Cooper’s Hill sugar estate where he had reigned with terror for a number of years, and by his insanity which the slaves felt was an act of God. Indeed, the slaves had a range of strategies for resistance at their disposal including hidden ones such as the belief that divine intervention would one day bring them the justice that they deserved, one of the Weapons of the Weak, to borrow James C. Scott’s phrase.
Frederick Douglass asserted that slavery was a disaster for the entire society as even good people were forced into situations where they had to compromise their goodness to accommodate the demands of the peculiar institution. Kennedy in his work shows that this view might not necessarily be true given the fact that there were slaveholders who rose above the institution by introducing measures to ameliorate the conditions of the slaves that they owned. One such slave master was Matthew Lewis, who had inherited two sugar estates in Jamaica when his father died in 1812. Lewis arrived in the island for the first time in 1816 and almost immediately began writing his “new code of laws” for his two properties. By the time of his second visit in 1818, the treatment that his slaves received had improved. Of course, this is not to say that Lewis was interested in abolition since he did not make any pronouncements to that effect. But it is noteworthy that there were slaveholders such as Lewis who could act differently from the others, which inadvertently put their slaves in positions of advantage. Kennedy found space for such a slaveholder in his work in the form of Mr. Sharpe, the owner of Cooper’s Hill and Sam Sharpe his namesake. Notions of honour helped to determine the attempts of Mr. Sharpe to act benevolently towards his slaves and further research needs to be done on the implications that these notions had for the agency of the slaves who were the beneficiaries of owners who, by and large, treated them better than other owners treated their own slaves.
One of the problems with historical fiction is precisely the fact that it is steeped in fiction and often has to make compromises in its use of history. In other words, historical fiction is generally more fiction than history, for it has to tell a story that contains all of the literary and dramatic features that can make it a good and marketable story, or one that the public would want to read. And Kennedy seems to be quite aware that he is not a historian but a novelist who has written a book for mass consumption, one that should sell many copies. Falsehoods, biases and misconceptions are easily replicated in works like Kennedy’s which try to straddle that thin and easily elusive line between fiction and fact. Information that gives the story substance and shape can be passed off as fact when it clearly is not. We do not know when Sharpe was born, for example, and we do not know how old he was when he was killed. Yet these fragments of information which have eluded historians appear in Kennedy’s work almost as if they are settled facts. We are even told the monetary value of �16 10s that Sharpe was given at the moment that he was facing his death by hanging (p. 259).
Since Sharpe was such a religious man, a deacon in the Baptist Church, it is not surprising that Christianity appears frequently in Kennedy’s narrative recounting the slave’s life. But we already know a great deal about this matter: the slaves’ attachment to Christianity and their involvement in the various Protestant groups in the colonies. Historians who have done excellent studies on the slaves and Christianity include Shirley C. Gordon, Mary Turner and to a lesser extent, Armando Lampe, Keith Hunte and Dale Bisnauth. However, Kennedy seems to be almost too intrigued by the role that Christianity played in the decision that Sharpe made to take action on 27 December 1831. As Kennedy made Sharpe divulge, “The reverend had planted a seed in my soul. I yearned now to know more about Jesus who promised that I would be set free” (p. 41). Statements such as these give the impression that Christianity gave the slaves their desire for freedom, meanwhile there is a large and significant historiography on slave resistance and other forms of agency showing the longstanding existence of the desire of the slaves for freedom. Slaves controlled the marketing of ground provisions in Jamaica and other colonies from which they earned large sums of money to purchase their freedom. There were also cases of slaves who petitioned local courts for freedom on the basis that they were illegally enslaved. And scores of slaves resorted to running away which showed that they were ready to risk a great deal to obtain their freedom even if this was temporary.
On the upside, Kennedy has given us a book that is well written and quite interesting, and one that adds both to Caribbean literature generally and to the historical fiction of the region. Kennedy also references a good deal of the historical material that he draws from and these will be of benefit to those readers who are keen to know more about the history of Sam Sharpe.
NOTES
1. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, New York: Plume, 1 989; 2. Marlon James, The Book of Night Women, New York: Riverhead Trade, 2010.
2. London: Hutchinson, 1967; New York: Morrow, 1972.
3. London: F. Wesley and A.H. Davis, 3rd Ed., 1831: Callaloo. Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 115-130; London: 1789.
4. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 20 10.
5. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
6. See Gary B. Nash, et. al., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 7th Ed., New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. pp. 356-57.
7. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 145-46.
8. Shirley C. Gordon, God Almighty Make Me Free: Christianity in Preemancipation Jamaica, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996; Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834, Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 1998; Armando Lampe, Mission or Submission? Moravian and Catholic Missionaries in the Dutch Caribbean during the 19th Century, G�ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001; Keith Hunte, “Protestantism and Slavery in the Caribbean” in Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays on Church History, Armando Lampe, ed., Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2001. pp. 86-125; Dale Bisnauth, History of Religions in the Caribbean, Kingston: LMH Publishing Company, 2006.
MAN VIBES
The following review appeared in the December 2010 issue of CHOICE : Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.
Humanities
Performing Arts
Hope, Donna P. Man vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall. Ian Randle, 2010. ISBN 9789766374075
An authority on Jamaican gender issues and the culture of popular music, Hope (Institute of Caribbean Studies, Univ. of the West Indies) goes far in decoding the complicated, socially ingrained intricacies of the Jamaican dancehall culture. As a native Jamaican who has lived in and studied elements if Jamaica’s male-dominated society for her entire life, Hope writes with authority and from a unique perspective. Her knowledge of long-standing male dominance in both Jamaican society and the music culture allows her to create a theoretical framework and apply it to a variety of issues specific to the dancehall style. She addresses promiscuity, violence/gun culture, anti-homosexuality discourse, consumerism, and fashion, casting them as integral parts of modern dancehall wordplay and surrounding culture. As she deconstructs the language and actions of both male and female dancehall artists, the author exposes the widespread roots of a condition some view as unique to a narrow musical niche.
Summing up: Recommended. Upper –division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
-D.V Moskowitz
University of South Dakota
Get Your Christmas Books!
Christmas is just around the corner and with it will come the yearly headache of choosing the right gifts for the right people. Well, why not go for books this year? Books are always popular and it’s not as difficult, as you might think, to find books to satisfy all your friends and family. There certainly is no shortage of books to choose from.
Since the launch of Usain Bolt’s 9.58: My Story in the third week of October, a new book has been launched every week. Last Sunday, Barrington Watson’s collection of his drawings titled Barrington: 50 Years of Drawing 1958-2008 was launched to an appreciative audience of collectors and art enthusiasts at the artist’s Gallery Barrington in St Andrew.
This week, Ian Randle Publishers, which is responsible for producing five of the new books hitting shelves by early December, released the third of its seasonal highlights, Jamaica Fi Real: Beauty Vibes and Culture, by Sunday Gleaner columnist Kevin O’Brien Chang.
The book was written and produced by Jamaicans, not only for a visitor market, but for Jamaicans at home and abroad. It provides a mirror of what is good and celebratory about being Jamaican in a way only we can describe, while attempting to explain to the world how such a small nation can have such global influence.
A feature of the book, which is illustrated with photographs both current and historical, is a ‘Top Ten’ section on various aspects of Jamaican life, scenes and experiences.
The theme of ‘Jamaica to the World’ is explored in Jamaica’s Gifts to the World by Lloyd Eubank-Green, which contains brief biographies of Jamaicans, both here and in the Diaspora, whose achievements have made an impact regionally and globally. They range from well-known personalities such as Louise Bennett, Bob Marley, Sir Willard White and Lord William Morris, to lesser-known figures like Monsignor Gladstone Wilson, who, at age 23, earned the first of his three doctorates, or Jaunel McKenzie, who was the first Jamaican model to shoot American Vogue. Eubank-Green believes these short biographies, with their stories of persistence, ambition, guts and positive thinking, will inspire young Jamaicans to emulate the achievements of these positive role models.
Rounding off the season of new books is a 450-plus page, lavishly illustrated cookbook titled Tastes Like Home by Guyananese-born journalist Cynthia Nelson. This is not a run-of-the mill cookbook but is rather a conversation about food and traditions in Caribbean homes and describes how, as Caribbean people, we call the same foods by different names and prepare dishes using different ingredients and techniques. Wilson imparts to readers her own style and method of preparing favourite dishes, aided by step-by-step illustrations that will encourage experienced, as well as new cooks to experiment with various dishes from around the Caribbean.
These are just a few of the books that will be hot this Christmas. Over the next few weeks, we will be giving you a peek at others.
This feature was carried in the November 7, 2010, Sunday Gleaner Newspaper
On the Future of Books
The following article by our Publisher,
Ian Randle, was carried in theSunday 31 October 2010 edition of the Gleaner Newspaper.
Ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented mechanically movable type that ushered in the printing process in the 15th century, the question of the survival of the book has been raised every time there has been a new technological advance.
Why, we should ask ourselves, is there this perennial fear that does not seem to apply to any other medium of information and entertainment? And why, after 500 years are we so afraid to accommodate even the thought of having the book as we know it, replaced by some other method of accessing information?
The fact that the question of the survival of the book is posed so often (and not just by those of us whose livelihood depends on the industry) is an indication of how connected we are as a society to this mode of entertainment and learning, that the mere suggestion of a possible threat seems to drive fear into our hearts.
But with each apparent threat, the printed book has emerged stronger with the result that today more, not fewer books are being produced, and while the sale of individual titles might have declined, the number of new titles being produced has actually grown and continues to grow.
So what accounts for the remarkable resilience of the book? Firstly, I believe that the book more than any other medium is the quintessential symbol of our civilization. It not only defines us as human beings, it is an essential part of our being. It symbolises what is orderly and civilised in our lives to the extent that even in the language of everyday life, the book assumes a central place; so for example we bring errant people ‘to book’; or we ‘book’ someone for breaking the law; we ‘book’ flights, hotel rooms and concert tickets and we ‘book’ debit and credit transactions as in bookkeeping for our businesses.
Even the most modern technologies cannot escape the overpowering influence of the book; so today we have the computer ‘notebook’; we develop vast social networks on ‘Facebook’ and we ‘bookmark’ our favourite sites on the Internet.
The second explanation for the resilience of the book is that unlike other forms of entertainment and education/information, it is (to use the metaphor of computers) both the hardware and the software. Consider if you will the music genre; once the old vinyl record became obsolete, so did the record player and the juke box. The cassette player had a relatively short life after cassettes were superceded by CDs and today, the DVD and the accompanying DVD player are fast becoming old technology, especially for the young who prefer to download music from the Internet to ipods, computers and mobile phones.
Several deaths
The music has not died but the method(s) by which we access it has died several deaths. Movie films have suffered a similar though less dramatic fate; movie cassettes and players were as short-lived as their musical counterparts, and even though DVDs have survived a bit longer, more and more people today download movies from the Internet to be watched on their computers and cell phones while in places like the US, videostore giants like Blockbuster are fast disappearing.
You can now order movies online from suppliers like NETFLIX for immediate delivery on to your TV screen at home. True, you can order the latest best-seller novel for immediate delivery on your Amazon Kindle hand-held reader but the Amazon service of the same printed book remains strong, as do the bookstore outlets around the globe selling far greater numbers of the printed book.
Instead of focusing on the perceived threats of the new technologies to the future survival of the printed book, we should be more positive and point to the many ways in which those same technologies have worked to enhance and promote the survival of the book. We need only to look at the phenomenon of digital or print-on-demand, which now allows us to print as few as a single copy of a book, or as many copies as there is the demand. What does this mean?
It means that in contrast to the old offset method of printing where you had to produce a minimum number of copies to make a book project economically viable, with digital printing you can achieve economic viability with no loss of quality on small numbers with the result that books that in the past would never have seen the light of day can now be produced and made available, even if the market is finite.
It also means that publishers no longer have to make large financial investments in printing and holding large inventories of a particular book, thus freeing up money to produce a wider range of books. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the new technologies not only prevent slow selling books from dying premature deaths – they also bring back books from the dead. The concept of an ‘out of print book’ is in fact no longer relevant.
At the same time old, rare books can now be scanned, stored electronically and printed on demand. The best example of real-time-on-demand printing is the so-called Book Espresso machine which Time Magazine described as one of the best inventions of 2009. Like the coffee-making machine after which it is named, this invention – no larger than a 6-ft high bookshelf can produce a book of virtually any size and length in 4-7 minutes from millions of titles stored in a central database, and bound and finished in a form that would be impossible for you to differentiate from a traditionally printed book. That machine is today installed and operational in over 100 locations across the US, Canada, Australia and the UK.
Matches the speed
What this machine in fact does is to match the speed of the electronic book, of say the Amazon Kindle, in getting the book to the reader in real time at no additional cost for shipping, thereby using the technology to ensure the continued viability of the printed book vis a vis its electronic counterpart.
At the end of the day, it requires of us in the business and publishers in particular, not to hold on to some bibliophilic nostalgia about how a book smells or feels, or to wax warm about the comfort of curling up in bed or on a sofa with a good book, although there is a lot to be said in defense of that luxury. Nor should we wring our hands in a gesture of helplessness and resignation in prematurely bemoaning the death of the printed book.
Rather, it behoves us to face the reality of the inexorable advance of technology and to redefine our concept of the book, to incorporate the increasing variety of modes and formats in which the modern reader or researcher has available to him or her to access information, and for us to see the book (yes, grudgingly) as simply one of a variety of those formats. In this way we will be doing a lot to ensure the continued survival of the book as we know and love it.
Ian Randle is a publisher and may be contacted at Ian@ianrandlepublishers.com
Print Books still Rule – Academically
Taken from Publishersweekly.com
Print Books Still BMOC
By Judith Rosen
Oct 28, 2010
E-books and e-readers may be making headlines off campus, but a new study by OnCampus Research, a division of the National Association of College Stores, reaffirmed last fall’s OnCampus Student Watch study that 74% of college students prefer print. According to the study taken by 627 college students earlier this month, only 13% purchased an e-book within the past three months. And just over half, or 56%, did so because it was required for class.
“It seems like the death of the printed book, at least on campus, has been greatly exaggerated, and that dedicated e-readers have a way to go before they catch on with this demographic,” says Elizabeth Riddle, manager of OnCampus Research. “The college-age market is definitely a growth opportunity for companies providing digital education products.”
Nor did dedicated e-readers fare significantly better on campus. Only 8% of college students own a dedicated e-reading device, and 59% of students who don’t own a device have no plans to purchase one anytime soon, i.e. within the next three months. Of those who did buy an e-book, the overwhelming majority, approximately 77%, read it on a laptop or Netbook. Currently the iPhone is the e-reader of choice with 23.9%, followed by the Nook at 21.6%. Nearly 15.7% read on the Kindle DX and the same number use the Kindle 3. Although 26% expressed interest in purchasing an iPad, only 13.7% own one, roughly the same percentage as the Sony Pocket reader.
The Launch that Was
Usain Bolt poses with Team IRP for the photogs after signing his book cover poster
Last night, along with sponsors Digicel Jamaica and Capital and Credit Financial Group, we celebrated the publication of Usain Bolt’s illustrated biography My Story 9.58: Being the World’s Fastest Man. It was a great affair with suprise guests, entertainers Shaggy and Wyclef Jean. The short programme was steered by Carole Beckford, Bolt’s publicist and included presentations by Norman Peart, Bolt’s Manager; Christine Randle, MD of Ian Randle Publishers,the local Publishers; Harry Smith of Digicel Jamaica who have been Bolt’s local sponsor since 2003/2004; and Michelle Wilson Reynolds of Capital and Credit Financial Group.
The programme was interspersed with short readings from the book as well as a few video clips ending, naturally, with Usain Bolt’s magnificent 9.58 run “shattering” his own record.
Along with representatives from the Government, a good contingent of persons from the sporting fraternity were present along with a large contingent from Bolt’s home parish Trelawny, including his Teachers and Mentors from his very early years. Of course, the Bolt family was out in full force reinforcing Usain’s message in his book that he has always had his family around him for suport. The ever-shy but ever-smiling Coach Glen Mills was also there to celebrate.
My Story 9.58, chronicles the journey Usain Bolt took to become the fastest man on earth. The disappointments and the triumphs are all shared with honesty and sincerity and are backed up by testimonials from all the poeple in his life who helped to become the man he is today. Beautifully enhanced with lots of photographs, this book is an inspirational read for the young and the young at heart.
Our author graciously took photographs with family, friends and fans and stayed on hand for quite a while autographing copies of his book.
The Long and the short of it
Sprint sensation Usain Bolt towers over Christine Randle Wray, Managing Director of Ian Randle Publishers when the Caribbean publishers of his illustrated biography My Story – 9.58: Being the World’s Fastest Man, paid him a surprise visit at Spartan Gym last week shortly after he’d finished a session with Coach Glen Mills.
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